Places to Stay the Night

by Ann Hood

  Caitlin moved closer to Dana, pretending not to listen but pressing her leg against Dana’s.

  “Oh,” Dana said. “Right.”

  “You were with Billy. You told all those wild stories about tattoos and a crazy mother.”

  “Is Billy here?” Dana said.

  The girl looked puzzled. “I don’t know. But could I have a goat cheese and shrimp pizza with extra garlic?”

  Caitlin repeated the order. “Goat cheese and shrimp with extra garlic. Ten minutes.”

  The girl laughed. “What are you? A team or something?”

  The door opened and Dana looked past the girl. Three guys walked in, smelling like beer.

  “See ya,” the girl said.

  “Danielle,” Dana said softly.

  “She’s nobody,” Caitlin said. “He’ll be in. Don’t worry.”

  Dana saw the girl, waiting for her Diet Coke from the drink person, watching.

  She made herself smile. “I’m not worried,” she said.

  The girl whispered something to her friend. Their eyes flitted toward Dana, then away.

  “You could come out with Kevin and Mike and me,” Caitlin said in the locker room.

  “No thank you,” Dana said. She pressed her hand against her chest to feel her heart beat. It was still thumping away in a slow perfect rhythm. “Remember, in ninth grade when we told Stephanie Masciarotte that we french kissed and she said we could get pregnant from that? She said we’d never get married. ‘Don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk free.’ Remember?”

  “I remember,” Caitlin said. “But I never understood it. I figured it was some weird Catholic thing. She went to Saint Agnes’s until eighth grade, you know.”

  “It means a guy won’t call if you sleep with him. That’s what it means.”

  Caitlin laughed. “That is so stupid. What are Mike and Kevin doing? Driving us nuts, that’s what. We can’t shake them. Stephanie wanted to become a nun. She like cleaned the altar at St. Agnes’s every Saturday before mass. This is not a normal person.”

  Dana made up a list of reasons why Billy hadn’t come in. Maybe he went home to New York. Maybe he had to study, or write a paper. She thought of the photograph of the girl in his room. Maybe, he had a girlfriend. A real girlfriend who didn’t give him the milk for free.

  Her father decided that Sunday was family day. They would eat a nice lunch together. They would go on some sort of an outing.

  Today he made Hamburger Helper with a side of pork and beans.

  “So,” he said. “What should we do today?”

  Troy shrugged. Even in the house now he always wore long sleeves to hide his tattoos. Still, Dana could make out John Lennon’s chin at his cuff.

  “We could drive somewhere,” their father said. “To Bennington, maybe. We could go and see that war monument they have up there.”

  “Sure,” Troy said. “That sounds great.”

  Dana said, “Hamburger Helper tastes like chemicals or something.”

  “You,” Tom told her, “are a grump. Who’s that boy who called this morning?”

  Dana looked up. “What boy?” Her heart was pounding now. She didn’t even need to search for the sound.

  “I wrote it down somewhere,” he said.

  “Where?”

  Tom looked startled. “I don’t know. By the phone, I guess. In the kitchen.”

  She was already up, walking as fast as she could. “Why didn’t you come and get me? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You were asleep,” he said.

  But she just waved him away, like an annoying fly or something. On a pad lined with little red hearts she found the note. Justin, it said, and then a number. She brought the whole pad back out to the dining room with her.

  “We could drive up there and maybe have dinner out,” her father was saying.

  “Who is this?” Dana said, pointing to the note. “Justin? What does that mean?” She felt as if she couldn’t control herself. As if she would start screaming any minute.

  “It’s his name, I guess,” Tom said.

  “What exactly did he say? Exactly?”

  Troy and Tom looked at each other.

  “What?” Dana said, her voice rising.

  “He said could he speak to you—”

  “To Dana?”

  Her father rolled his eyes. “Of course to Dana. ‘May I speak to Dana?’ he said and I told him you were still asleep and he left his name and number. The whole conversation lasted about thirty seconds. Maximum.”

  She threw the pad down on the table. “He must have said Billy. Not Justin. I don’t know anybody named Justin.”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead, she stormed out of the room and up the stairs.

  The war monument was closed.

  “‘Winter hours,’” Tom read from the sign. “It’s not winter yet.”

  Dana sat slumped in the back seat. She was sure it was Billy who had called. Her father was dumb. Family day was dumb.

  “Let’s go home then,” she said.

  Tom tossed the car keys back and forth, from one hand to the other. Back and forth, back and forth until Dana thought she would lose her mind.

  “We could eat somewhere,” Troy said.

  “We just had lunch like two hours ago,” Dana muttered. “This is so stupid.”

  Her father and Troy were outside, leaning against the car.

  “There’s this museum or something at Williams,” Troy said. He sounded almost shy about it. “This girl I know told me about it.”

  “A museum?” Tom said. “With what? Paintings?”

  Troy shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You are both such philistines.” Dana said. “What else would be in a museum?”

  Her father poked his head in the car. “Dinosaurs,” he said.

  “Let’s just go home,” she said.

  Troy said, “Yeah. I think the museum’s closed on Sundays anyway.”

  They got back in the car.

  “In Boston,” Tom said, looking in the rearview mirror at Dana, “there’s a museum that has these see-through mannequins. You can watch all the body systems at work. Digestion. Respiratory. Different parts light up. The kidneys. The heart.”

  “Fine,” Dana said. Her feet were tapping as if they could get her home sooner.

  “And the mannequins talk. ‘This is my heart. It beats so many times a minute. It pumps this much blood.’”

  Dana rolled her eyes.

  “Not all museums,” Tom said, “have paintings.”

  “I met you at a party last week,” Justin said on the phone. “At Williams? I was the one who told you that my mother was nuts too.”

  Dana frowned. She didn’t remember anything like that.

  “Now she takes lithium though, so she’s better,” Justin said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was wondering if you were free Thursday night. There’s this party here. At school.”

  Dana touched the little holes in the mouthpiece of the phone, tracing them in a circle.

  “There’s going to be that same band. They play at just about every party,” he added.

  She thought about Billy and her heart started to go crazy. Something else too. She got this liquidy feeling in her thighs that spread upward and made her feel warm, like she had a fever.

  “I might be going with Billy,” Dana said. You don’t do those things like that with someone you don’t like, she wanted to say. He likes me.

  “Gee, I don’t think so,” Justin said. He had a slight accent, like he was from somewhere south, but not too far south. “He suggested I call.”

  Dana swallowed hard. She could feel her face getting red and hot.

  “I even think Melissa is going to be here for the weekend.”

  Melissa, she repeated to herself. Melissa.

  “What do you say?” Justin asked her. He didn’t sound at all impatient. His voice was smooth and polite with that touch of an accent. A gentleman.

  “
Okay,” Dana said. She was afraid her voice would crack if she said anything more.

  Dana called Billy from the pay phone in the parking lot of Pizza Pizzazz. The phone rang for a very long time. She listened to it, trying to imagine that dorm, the long hallway that smelled of incense and socks and soap. Caitlin had told her about something called creative visualization. You had to close your eyes and picture the thing happening, as if it were a movie in your brain. If you could really visualize it, then it would definitely happen.

  There were warm-up exercises, like imagining a lemon until the picture is so real your lips actually pucker, but Dana felt pressed for time. So she just pictured the dorm, the long hallway with the phone at the end, and hoped for the best. Finally someone answered, all out of breath, and when she asked for Billy the boy just let the phone drop. Dana heard it bang against the wall. She heard voices, doors slamming, footsteps. She held for so long that she had to feed more change into the pay phone. While she waited, the sign that said PIZZA PIZZAZZ in red and green lights went off, leaving the parking lot dark.

  When Billy came to the phone, he was out of breath too.

  “Hi,” Dana said, all phony, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’s Dana.” She almost added Harper, but stopped herself.

  “Hey,” Billy said. “How’s it going?”

  “Good. How about you?”

  “Great, but we’re in the middle of Oktoberfest? It’s this big festival? And I’m in the keg race.”

  Dana swallowed hard. “Oh. What’s that? A bunch of guys running with a keg?”

  “Basically, yeah. So I’ve sort of got to go. But it was great talking to you. And I’ll see you soon, right?”

  Dana tried to say something fast. About Justin. About the girl in the picture. About how she’d had the same boyfriend since seventh grade and they’d just broken up really. I am not what you think, she wanted to say.

  “Did I tell you how my best friend … her name’s Caitlin … how we’re going to New York—” This was not what she meant to say at all, but it seemed important suddenly that Billy knew her, knew that she mattered.

  But Billy was talking to someone else. He was saying, “No shit! No shit! This I’ve got to see.”

  “Hello?” Dana said, even though she knew her voice was just shooting into that long hallway, that no one was listening. “Hello?”

  Billy was there with the girl from the picture. He kept his hand resting on the small of her back. She had a way of tilting her head and looking up at him and almost smiling that made Dana uncomfortable, even from across the room. It wasn’t a full smile. Instead, just the corners of her mouth turned up, as if she was slightly amused. She went to Sarah Lawrence, a fancy school somewhere in New York. To go there, Dana figured from the way everyone talked about it, you had to be very smart and very rich.

  Justin was not bad-looking. He was from Washington, D.C. “Not many people are actually from there,” he’d told her. She didn’t care. His manners bothered her. They seemed too planned, too purposeful. All she wanted was to watch Billy and his girlfriend.

  “They’ve gone out since they were like fourteen,” Justin told her.

  “I had a boyfriend like that,” she said, trying to sound as if she was beyond all that. “Eventually you outgrow each other.”

  She looked back toward them again. His hand had not moved. Her smile had not widened. They were like a Barbie and Ken doll, posed there for everyone to see.

  Justin told her he wanted to be president.

  She was hardly listening. “Of what?” she asked him.

  He rolled his eyes. “Of the United States,” he said. He wore small round glasses like someone in a picture from the 1920s. Behind them his eyes were a light amber.

  When he went to get them some more beer from the kegs in the corner, Dana drifted toward Billy. She saw when he noticed her standing there. Her mouth went all dry and cottony.

  “Dana,” he said, as calm as can be. “Are you here with Justin?”

  Close up, his girlfriend looked even more doll-like. Smooth skin, like porcelain. Eyes clear and shiny. Glossy hair. Dana had an urge to muss it all up somehow.

  “Melissa,” he was saying, “this is Dana … I’m sorry. I forgot your last name.”

  “Harper,” she managed to say. If she blinked she would cry. She felt the tears right there, ready to fall. “I have something in my eye,” she said.

  “Here,” Melissa said, holding out a napkin. “Contact lenses, right?” She smiled now, a full sweet one.

  Dana looked up, into those clear eyes. “Right,” she said.

  Dana told Caitlin all about it after work on Saturday night She did not think she had ever felt so miserable.

  “Listen,” Caitlin said, “there is no reason to be so upset. A, the girlfriend is the one who looks like an asshole. B, he couldn’t be nice to you with her right there. C, this guy Justin wants to be the president of the United States. You could be the first lady. And D, we’re leaving this town in a mere six months and will never see any of these people again anyway.” She smiled.

  Dana was lying flat on one of the long benches in front of the lockers, staring up at the ceiling with its cracked paint and fluorescent lighting.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she moaned. “I feel so awful.”

  “Billy will call you,” Caitlin said. “I just know he will.”

  Dana closed her eyes. She had put on her tough-girl act. She had laughed too loud and said outrageous things. She had made sure Billy could see her and hear her the whole time. She had made sure that he saw her leave the party a little too early with Justin’s arm around her. She had acted like a total jerk, done everything wrong.

  “Are you upset because you slept with Justin?” Caitlin was saying. “Big deal. We need experience. We need excitement.”

  Justin had not even driven her home in the morning. Lacrosse practice, he’d said, all polite and apologetic. She was not even quite sure what lacrosse was. He’d walked her to the bus stop and very carefully written down her telephone number and the nights she worked. He would make a very good president, she thought. He seemed so sincere.

  Dana did not open her eyes. All college boys, she decided, were smooth. They knew how to get you all heated up and it had nothing to do with love at all. It had nothing to do with anything. They told you your skin was soft as silk or velvet, they whispered “Are you protected?” and produced birth control like magic. It was as if they’d all taken the same course on sex. At this moment, she hated herself.

  “You can’t just lie there forever,” Caitlin told her. “It isn’t the end of the world.”

  “I know.”

  This was what a girl needed a mother for, she thought. When a boy breaks your heart and you sleep with his friend to get even when really it doesn’t even matter and your life makes no sense at all. Not even a little. A mother was supposed to hold you in her arms. She was supposed to give you advice. She was supposed to tell you that you weren’t such a bad person. A mother would fix everything. A mother would make her daughter feel like she mattered, like she was something even though she felt like nothing.

  Winter

  TO LIBBY, IT SEEMED as if everyone in L.A. was in the business, one way or another. Even Von’s was filled with would-be stuntmen and screenwriters, actors and composers. Back in Holly, Libby was always special. She was the prettiest, the smartest, the best dressed. Here, she started to feel ordinary. Everywhere she looked she saw someone who seemed to sparkle more than she did.

  She believed the floor wax commercial might change that. As she stood at the checkout line, ringing up produce she’d never even heard of before, things like arugula and shiitake mushrooms, she half expected a customer to recognize her, to shout, “Hey! Aren’t you the woman who makes stars fly out of floors?”

  But no one ever did. Instead, they passed through her line, smiling blank smiles, flashing too perfect teeth and too enthusiastic wishes for a good day. She weighed their asparagus and bananas like
a robot. Sometimes, as she stood there working, a flash of that day came to her—the man’s bulging stomach hanging over, small black bikini underpants, the sunlight glistening on the glass skyscraper, the hot pressure of his hand on her head. She had walked out of there triumphant, expecting something more than the part, although she wasn’t sure what exactly.

  Her friend Janice at Von’s had made a comment about the myth of the casting couch. “Do you believe,” Janice had said to her over drinks at El Torito, “that some idiots believe a blow job will get them somewhere?”

  “Well,” Libby said, “it could. It could get someone a part or something.”

  Janice stared at her over the salted rim of her margarita. “Yes,” she said. “Or something.”

  A girl named Tammy who used to work on lane six got a big part in a Steven Spielberg film. Tammy was twenty-two and everyone said she looked like a young Susan Sarandon. Her last day at work they threw her a party in the back room. Libby watched as Tammy stood there, not even trying to act modest, just gushing and nodding and looking all superior. Really, Libby thought, Tammy looked nothing like Susan Sarandon. Not at all.

  She left the party early and took her place back behind the cash register. Her first customer was another bright-eyed tanned woman in shorts and running shoes, the kind who doesn’t stop running even in the supermarket, her feet moving up and down in rhythm, a Walkman playing in her ears. She bought seven kinds of lettuce and three bottles of Evian. Libby did not even know there were so many different kinds of lettuce until she got this job. Lettuce had started to irritate her.

  The woman jogged away, and Libby started to ring up the next customer’s groceries. It was funny how she could tell a lot about someone by what they bought. This guy, for example, was just moving in to a new place—toilet bowl brush and cleaner, dishwasher detergent, laundry soap, light bulbs, and floor wax. Her floor wax. Behind her, Libby could hear Tammy shouting her goodbyes. “I’ll give Steven a big hug from everyone,” she said.

  Libby gripped the bright blue container of floor wax.

  “I did this commercial,” she said. “I’m the woman who mops the floor and stars shoot from it.”